I'm working through Packt Publishing's Ubercart 2x book to create a spiffy Drupal e-commerce site. So far, I'm finding the book itself worthwhile; it's been quite a help in installing and setting up Ubercart, and creating some basic products. All fine and good, and I look forward to showing off a sample site and writing up the book review.
What's taking me so long is getting Drupal/Ubercart to work right. First I had a problem with certain Ubercart admin forms making themselves unavailable – a problem which, like an earlier unrelated problem with image paths, mysteriously hiccuped itself into resolved status. (Oh, Drupal, stop toying with me.)
Now it's problems with importing nodes from a spreadsheet. This is a part of the book I could just skip, creating all my sample products one node at a time. But I've been wanting to play with node importing for some time now; I have plans for a future site that'll require mass import of music-related data. Any e-commerce site I build in the future, too, is almost certain to require import of product data, so I definitely want to take this chance to learn the importing ropes.
The import process calls upon the good offices of the Node Import module, a welcome tool which, although used in the Packt book, isn't entirely up to full production snuff in Drupal 6. My first bug upon trying to import product data took the form of an ugly error message:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function uc_product_node_is_product()...
Bleah. One solution, as noted in module issues threads, is to forego the latest release candidate, 6.x-1.0-rc4, and use the newer 6.x-1.x-dev instead. That worked! But then comes the second bug:
Once the spreadsheet file and other assets (such as images) are all ready, Node Import takes you through an eight-screen process to start the import. Click "Start Import" on that last screen, and something magical is supposed to happen with (I'm told) a progress screen and, finally, magically-created nodes. Alas, I'm getting the Drupal equivalent of that Millennium Falcon hyperspace scene, where the engines rev up and... sputter out, keeping the ship right where it is. My site just jumps back to the start of the import process, with no progress bars, nothing imported, no new nodes. I add a little detail in an issues thread where a couple other Drupalers have reported the same trouble.
(ADDITION: The above problem holds true using both a tab-separated format or a comma-separated format, whether I output from Numbers or from Excel. Actually, using comma-separated (CSV) format, it holds true using general Latin encodings – but what Node Import asks for is UTF8 encoding. When I try that, I don't even get as far as the end of the eight screens; after just four or so, I get this lovely error message:
Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /<my web site path>/sites/all/modules/node_import/node_import.admin.inc on line 371
Sigh.)
So that's where I am today. I expect I'll get past it eventually... maybe even really quickly, if a kind soul reading this can suggest what's going wrong. Anyone?? (Banging on the monitor isn't helping at all.)
In the meantime, looking ahead through the Packt book, I see all kinds of exciting Ubercart features waiting to be tapped. Sure hope I can get there soon!
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